Status Updates From Lectures on the History of ...

It comes to pass in Philosophy that although the “I” is the positing, yet the posited content of that which is thought is the object existent in and for itself. If one were to remain at saying that the “I” is that which posits, this would be the false idealism of modern times: in earlier times men did not remain at saying that what is thought is bad because I posit it.

This section on Anaxagoras is a nasty business. Mental gymnastics.

Divisibility is, as potentiality, the universal; there is continuity as well as negativity or the point posited in it — but posited as moment, and not as existent in and for itself. I can divide matter into infinitude, but I only can do so; I do not really divide it into infinitude. This is the infinite, that no one of its moments has reality.

'He who understands nothing of the matter, and has no system, but merely historic knowledge, will certainly be impartial.'

Having finished the presocratics here, I'm going to return to Herodotus to have a better context. Should have read him first but so it's life.

...a man has only to consider for himself, as for all others, what is best and most perfect, and then he would of necessity know the worse, for the same science comprises both.

The logical progression here is strikingly similar to the first chapter of Hegel's Logic. It helps a lot to have read it.

Ah, the Eleatics... This is where shit gets real.

"The measureless quality of substance in the East is brought, by means of the Greek mind, into what is measurable and limited; it is clearness, aim, limitation
of forms, the reduction of what is measureless, and of infinite splendor and riches, to determinateness and individuality."

"With Anaxagoras a light, if still a weak one, begins to dawn, because the understanding is now recognized as the principle."

"Here we see land ; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic."

How pleasant to withdraw from the jibber-jabber to the lucidity of Hegel with Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, the Pythagoreans, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus, Zeno, Heraclitus.... This is where true spirit resides, at home with itself.

Atheists and PC'ers and other opinion=mongers will find their excuse not to read Hegel within these first 100 or so pages. But if you don't read Hegel.... well, you know what'll happen.